Knowledge
by Confusedknight
Summary: An exploration of a young academic's struggles at the Royal University. Stumbling across the ultimate weapon the unlikely heroine learns that not everything is governed by laws and formulae, and that courage comes in all shapes and sizes. -Physics within-


**-a/n- **Sorry it's not a Fallen update, this idea just kept bugging me until I wrote it out... I think it's in canon...it's a bit unusual, definitely different to my usual style...have a read and see :D

**Confusedknight xx**

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**A body will remain at rest or constant velocity unless acted upon by an external, unbalanced force.**

She sits hunched over the dry tome, ink speckled fingers resting lightly on the smooth parchment. Nondescript grey eyes scan the printed words flicking backward and forth, picking out words such as 'Force', 'Optimum propellant ' and 'Trajectory.'

A sigh escapes her lips and she stands up, pushing back the stool on which she had been sitting. The movement sends dust motes swirling into the air so that they dance and drift in the thin strip of sunlight that is evading the heavy curtain. A puff of breath later and the flickering candle goes out, leaving the room in semi-darkness. Her thin arms struggle briefly with the dense material but soon the bright morning is filling every cramped corner of her room.

**Time = distance/speed**

It is not a homely abode, but one that sees students come and go with the turn of the years. Some occupants bring paintings, lucky ornaments or trinkets from home. It's current occupant has piled books on every available surface, haphazardly categorised in teetering stacks. Paper litters the floor, some crumpled into balls and others displaying scribbled notes, half-formed ideas recorded hastily.

She stretches out her back with a yawn, wondering where the night has disappeared to. From the bell tolling in the distance she learns that there is but an hour until her first lecture. Blinking in surprise, the young academic smoothes her rumpled gown. There would be time to change, fetch some breakfast and make her way towards the lecture theatre. Or, she could summarise the last of her findings.

Her hand inches towards the well used stylus.

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**An inelastic collision is one in which part of the kinetic energy of a body is transferred to another form of energy.**

'Sorry,' a fleeting acknowledgement that the giant youth had almost knocked her tiny frame clean off of her feet, and then he was gone.

At one hundred and fifty centimetres and spectrally thin, she was more often than not mistaken for a child than a nineteen year old student. Sometimes she wonders if her classmates ever see her at all.

**The horizontal motion of a projectile is entirely independent of it's vertical motion.**

The university divides students into two independent categories; non-gifted and gifted, the latter being prized above the other. She divides them into two groups also.

There are those that must always be doing something; campaigning against laws, debating with gesticulating arms and voices that carry down the stone corridors of the faculty. They were always signing petitions, joining societies, making outlandish statements. Once, when she'd first enrolled at the university a great many students had even died their hair blue in a proclamation of the shallowness of fashion.

The second group are the ones that must always be thinking, absorbed in their self-created world of learning. Events outside their studies are irrelevant as they pursue the higher arts, the acquisition of wisdom. They drift through the archaic establishment uncommunicative and aloof, deigning to listen only to the ancient words of great scholars preserved in the expansive library.

**Displacement = initial velocity x time + 1/2 x acceleration x time squared**

At a glance, and that was all she ever received anyway, our academic appears to fit neatly into the second group, although in heart she feels like she belongs neither here nor there; displaced.

True, she has never overcome that self-filling awkwardness that prevents her from offering an opinion in a debate, but she does have opinions. And though she busies herself with books instead of the friends she longs for, she is not deaf to the news from the Kingdom, the happenings at court.

**Pressure = force/area**

As a younger daughter of a younger son of Fief Jonajin and with the outbreak of the Scanran War, it had taken little persuasion for her to be allowed to travel to Corus and sit the entrance examinations. Ungifted, with no looks or wealth to speak of and no desire to take up arms, University had been the only option for the quiet, bookish girl.

She sailed through the series of tests and bedecked in a white novice robe was matriculated into the Royal University of Tortall. The ceremony was filled with excited youths; some looking forward to the drunken debauchery of the first week and others with shiny-eyed parents, unable to believe the grandness to which their offspring had risen. Settling in to her bare room and curling up with a book, she wondered if her life had even changed. A shadow at home, invisible here.

For a while she had mixed academia with her passion for the old tales, both true and fictional. Now after three and a half years years her imaginings and dreamings were beginning to fade under the pressure of reality; without gift or skill at arms there was no way to protect your country, become a heroine, there wasn't anything at all to mark you from the crowd.

She kept on studying.

**Energy can neither be made nor destroyed, only transformed.**

It was her penultimate term at the Royal University and this offered a chance to conduct a project, to branch out from the curriculum. She was fascinated by the idea of energy; this substance that existed within every object and being, one that could transform, shift, translocate between bodies and existed in some unquantifiable guise in the Gift. However, it was a firm belief of hers that pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge was pointless. She likes to recognise the applications for all that she learns. Settling on a start point with the aerodynamics of arrow flight, she began to research.

**Force = mass x acceleration**

She was surprised to learn about the limited range and impact that an arrow could have. Calculations, scribbles and ideas began to fill the pages of her workbooks. One frustrated night of studying later she arrives at the estimated maximum force of an arrow shot from a powerful bow. The challenge is set.

At first she dabbles into researching the craftsmanship of the bow itself but quickly leaves this topic; the bowmen have been experimenting for years and recently only small improvements have been discovered. She briefly considers slingshots before they too were dismissed. No, she needs something new, a whole new idea.

**Volume = mass/density**

On a rare night that she actually remembers that mortal beings need sleep, the peace of slumber does not visit. Thoughts churn in her mind and she sees that the limiting factor of all her research is the humans themselves. The strength of the body will not exceed certain parameters. And that is when she truly sees that whereas warriors have all but reached these boundaries, there is still infinite power and possibility residing within the depths of the mind. A shiver of excitement runs through her at this thought.

**Impulse = force x ∆time**

She needs to look at the problem from a new angle. The following morning she scrawls untidily, ink spattering in her haste. The Gift couldn't be used as a source -it would be too limited, she scowls to herself, mind whirring. Heat was pure energy, but not easy to conjure...unless...the idea slammed into her with a breath-taking certainty.

It didn't matter that she was barefoot, her hair escaping from the long braid it had been tied in the night before or that she was dressed rumpled clothing. She raced down the corridor with the tantalising idea putting fire in her veins. At the staircase she had to stop and catch her breath; her face was unusually flushed, clashing with her burgundy gown.

**Work done = force x distance moved in direction of force**

Over the next two weeks an extraordinary amount of books were withdrawn, all relating to the composition and behaviour of compounds. By the third week she was almost living in the library, working day and night, surviving on a single meal when the grey-haired librarian insisted she leave. When she had gleaned a wealth of theoretical knowledge it was time to put all her hard work to the test.

She bought supplies of the most likely compounds and began to experiment, moving beyond that which had been noted in the published works. This had mixed effects.

**An exothermic reaction has ****ΔH 0 and**** releases energy in the form of heat. **

When Tuesday afternoon rolled around she could be found sitting in the infirmary, eyes puffy and red from crying. Her right arm was burned and bleeding from the shattered glass that had exploded into it. She whimpered softly, wondering how the characters in the great stories managed to block out pain. She supposed they concentrated on the imperilled people that they were saving. So she concentrated on her equations.

Eighty percent potassium nitrate had definitely been a mistake.

'I'm healer Queenscove, uh Sir Nealan of Queenscove,' said the handsome green-eyed man burdened with the task of patching her arm up. 'What's your name?'

'Hanna,' she stuttered out. After a moment she was about to add her fief, but Sir Nealan was fussing about with implements and swabs, plainly not listening. Her heart sank. She wished that there was a book that could tell her what exactly it was about her appearance that made her so uninteresting.

She didn't attempt to start a conversation and waited in silence. The healer finished his work and left her arm almost as good as new.

'Well I don't quite know how you managed to burn and cut yourself all at once, but you shouldn't be experimenting by yourself until you're at least in your third year. 'His elegant fingers reached for a form, 'What was your name again?'

'Hanna.' Was the whispered reply.

**Potential energy = (constant x mass y x mass z)/distance**

She left physically healed but hurting terribly on the inside. Would it be too much for anyone to take note of her, acknowledge her potential as a human being? How could worth solely be calculated on outwards demeanour?

She looked down at her pathetic figure. A more forthright female, perhaps the eponymous hero of a gallant tale, would've told Sir Nealan that she was in her fourth year, on the brink of publishing her own work. But she let it slide. As usual.

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**10 KNO****3**** + 3 S + 8 C → 2 K2CO3**** + 3 K2SO4**** + 6 CO****2**** + 5 N****2****. ****

She notes the optimum composition of the powder; seventy five parts potassium nitrate, ten parts sulfur and fifteen parts carbon (in the form of charcoal).

Caught up in the excitement of a completed part, she forgets to attend her lecture all together and sketches out designs for the physical mechanism of the weapon. These have been forming for weeks and by the end of the day each component has been commissioned from a different metal worker in the city.

**Final Velocity = Initial velocity + (acceleration x time)**

It all comes together quickly after that, the powder in lead capsules, an oiled clean barrel, a pin and hammer. She loads the weapon with shaking hands. A bang and a burst of acrid smoke later there is an excited academic examining the pellet buried so deeply in her wooden desk that it is unable to be coaxed out.

Elated by her success, she casts around for something to test the weapon on. Short of destroying priceless volumes there is little in her room to be of any use. She journey's to the butchers and buys the cheapest hunk of meat. Then, in an act that surprises even herself, she "borrows" a shoulder plate from the armour of Sir Gregory II which is displayed at the end of her corridor. The meat is positioned, hunkered behind the steel. Her first shot misses, she hasn't any accuracy yet. The second hits.

Grey eyes are wide with shock. The pellet has mushroomed out on impact with the metal and has torn a hole right through the meat, almost one centimetre and a half in diameter. It is only then that she realises what she has done.

**Power = work/time**

She's spent days of her life dreaming of being an empowered woman like the Queen or the Lioness. Now that she has stumbled across her own power it scares her just a little. This weapon she's created could bring down armies and by effect countries. Rulers and leaders across the realms would pay almost any price for this knowledge that she's compiled. And when the true implications of this sink in, she is terrified.

That afternoon she finds herself in the palace grounds of all places. Still in a state of shock, it was a whim that carried her legs southwards, across the Olorun. Across the court she thinks she can see a cousin of hers training with the other pages, but it is the knights she has come to watch.

**Kinetic energy = 1/2 x mass x velocity squared**

The way that the swords twist and move in synchrony, she can see the element of beauty that books often speak of. Only the sweat beaded on every brow betrayed just how tough the exercise really was. They were trained, honed, this was their life's work, to be fit, to serve the crown. And she had the power to rip it all away. What good was a sword against her weapon that could rip through armour from one hundred paces?

**Momentum = mass x velocity**

She could change the way war was made irreversibly. At first the soldiers with her unique weapons would be like gods amongst men, but all it would take was for one weapon to reach enemy hands and then they too would have the knowledge of how it would work; after all, she'd pieced it together. Advances would be made, the range of the weapon increased, perhaps even giant siege versions made that could slam balls of metal through stone. All that destruction, accredited to her.

**To every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction.**

Her life too could be changed. An estate would be granted and a fair sum of money also. Suddenly the plain child-like student of a little-known Northern fief would become an eligible young women. Dolled up in pretty outfits people would look twice at her. Would marriage come her way? She'd be famous for her intellect, sung about even. She could write books from the comfort of her own manor, a respected academic, all her dreams come true...But at what price?

And then it came to her, that this was the age old choice that imbued every tale she'd ever read. The choice between what was right, and what was easy. How simple it seemed to a reader, the obvious path the hero should take. And yet, when it concerned your own life the problem became infinitely complex.

Bitter tears stung her eyes as she realised that her success could never be noted. The weapon must be destroyed and the notes stashed away, never to be read except under dire circumstances.

Disappointment fills her to the brim; heroes were always recognised for _their _courage and achievements. Heroes don't cry either she thinks sadly, but as her eyes overflow she tells herself she doesn't care.

Hanna of Jonajin learned a harsh lesson that day, and it didn't involve laws or formulae. There wasn't an equation in sight.

She now knows that some courageous deeds will never be acknowledged, and far from detracting from their merit, it increases it. She knows that knowledge is both a wondrous and dangerous thing. She also knows she has a reason to hold her head a little higher. And she does.

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** Sorry for the awful notation, I don't know if it'll support subscript. (This is also a simplified equation.)

So...I have no idea where that came from...but did you like it? It was refreshing to write something a bit...different from Fallen. It was nice to try out a new style, experiment a bit and try to tie in the physics with relevant paragraphs. It was also fun to explore a downtrodden character so different to all of the canon heroines.

Please review, I've spent many hours experimenting and would like to know your opinion on the results :D

**Confusedknight xx**


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